Cushman returned to his chair.
Without preliminary I said, “John Lischer’s dead.”
Cushman stared at me with his mouth open. As usual Helena’s face showed no expression.
“But you told Helena you’d been checking the hospital and his condition was listed as fair,” Cushman said stupidly.
“His heart gave out. All he had was a fractured hip, but he was nearly eighty.”
Helena asked in a calm voice, “How does this affect our arrangements?”
“It changes the whole picture,” I told her. “You can’t settle with a corpse. If you get caught now, you’ll be charged with manslaughter. You’ll be charged even if you turn yourself in.”
Harry Cushman’s face was gray. “Listen, I can’t afford to be accessory to a manslaughter.”
“You already are,” I informed him. “You were in the car that killed Lischer. If you didn’t want to be an accessory, you should have reported to the cops at once.” I let a little contempt creep into my voice. “Of course if you go to them right now, they’ll probably let you off the hook because they’ll be more interested in the driver. Mrs. Powers will take the rap... probably five years... and all you’ll get is a little bad publicity.”
He licked his lips and flicked his eyes at Helena, who stared back at him expressionlessly.
“Naturally we have to protect Helena,” Cushman said with an effort to sound protective. “What’s your suggestion?”
“They know it was a green Buick.” I looked at Helena. “Your belief that you hadn’t knocked anything loose was a little wrong. You left a bumper guard at the accident scene.”
I turned my attention back to Cushman. “Now that it’s classified as a homicide instead of just a hit-and-run, every repair garage in the state and halfway across Illinois will be alerted. The risk of getting the car fixed has at least tripled. And so has my fee. I want another ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand!” Cushman squeaked. “You agreed to five!”
“Not to help cover a homicide, I didn’t. Make up your mind fast. Either it’s fifteen grand or nothing. If you don’t want to play, I’ll hand back your five right now and call the police.”
Both of them stared at me, Cushman with petulant belligerence and Helena with mild curiosity, as she might have examined an interesting bug on a flower.
Finally Helena’s husky voice said, “I don’t see what there is to argue about, Harry. Mr. Calhoun seems to be in a perfect bargaining position. He always seems to be in a perfect bargaining position.”
Cushman sputtered and fumed for a few minutes more, but finally he agreed to deliver me ten thousand more in cash at noon the next day. The money didn’t mean anything to him, of course, because he’d been left more millions than he could possibly spend in a lifetime, but I think he was beginning to wish he’d never heard of the beautiful Helena Powers. I could tell by the way he looked at her she held a terrific fascination for him, but I suspect he was beginning to wonder if she was worth the complications she was bringing into his life.
I didn’t care what he thought so long as he came up with an additional ten thousand dollars.
7
Hit-and-run deaths don’t create much newspaper stir in a city the size of St. Louis, particularly where the victim isn’t important from a news point of view. The Friday papers carried a brief account of John Lischer’s death and the statement that the police were searching for a green Buick damaged on the right side. The original report of the accident had been only a paragraph back in the stock market sections, but this appeared on the second page of both the Post and the Globe. Apparently there was a dearth of other news.
At noon Cushman brought me two more sheafs of fifty-dollar bills. I took them and the original packet down to my safe deposit vault, first transferring a thousand dollars to my wallet.
Then I relaxed for the weekend, resting up in the expectation of not getting any sleep at all Monday night.
At seven o’clock Monday evening Helena Powers phoned me to say her husband had caught his plane and the way was clear for me to pick up the Buick.
“The keys in the car?” I asked.
“No. Stop at the house for them. Alice isn’t here and I’m all alone. No one will see you.”
At eight-thirty, just as it was beginning to get dark, she opened the front door to my ring. She was wearing a plain street dress and a pert little straw hat, and she carried a light jacket over her arm. Silently she locked the door behind me, then led me back to the kitchen, switching off lights as we passed through each room. On the kitchen table stood a small suitcase.
“You going somewhere?” I asked.
“With you,” she said, giving me a deadpan look.
Setting down my own bag, I looked at her in astonishment. “Why?”
“Because I want to.”
“I’ll be gone nearly a week.”
“I’ve made arrangements with Alice,” she said. “She thinks I’m driving up to my sister’s in Columbia. I gave her a week off.”
“Suppose your husband tries to phone long distance and doesn’t get any answer?”
“He never phones. He just writes a card every day when he’s gone. And I never write back.”
I shrugged. “It’s your car. I guess you can ride in it if you want.”
I picked up her bag and my own, waited while she flicked out the lights and opened the back door for me. Then I waited again while she locked the door behind us.
In the garage I set down the bags and asked her for the car keys. Silently she handed me a leather key case.
“Which is the trunk key?” I asked.
She pointed to one.
I slid it into the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. I tried it upside down, but it wouldn’t go in.
“The lock’s jammed,” I said.
Helena tried it with no more success than I had. Finally she said, “I’m sure it’s the right key,” and looked puzzled.
“The devil with it,” I said. “We haven’t got that much luggage anyway.”
I tossed our bags on the floor of the small back seat. The top of the convertible was still down, as it had been on the night of the accident, but I put it up before we started.
Apparently the only damage the car had suffered was body damage, because it drove perfectly. I noted with satisfaction the gas tank registered nearly three-fourths full, which should take us better than two hundred miles before we’d have to worry about refueling.
I didn’t figure there was much risk of us being stopped even in St. Louis by some cruising patrol car, because it was now six days since the accident and four days since John Lischer had died. I knew a routine order would have been issued to all cars to look for a damaged green Buick, but I had also ridden patrol enough back in my police days to know that by now this order would be filed ’way at the back of most cruising cops’ minds. They wouldn’t actually be searching for the hit-and-run car to the extent of carefully looking over every green automobile they saw. Even if we ran into a cop and he noticed the damage, there was a good chance it wouldn’t register on him immediately that our car was green or that it was a Buick.
It also helped that it was now dark and that the damage was all on the right side. Simply by keeping in the right-hand lane I could prevent any cars passing us in the same direction we were going from noticing it. The only real danger was in meeting a squad car coming from the opposite direction, for the front bumper was badly bent and the front right fender was crushed all out of shape.